The Evolution of the B2B Buyer Journey: Strategic Implications of a Decade of Change

Most B2B marketing teams optimise for a problem that has already been solved by the time they encounter it. By the point a buyer fills in a form, downloads a paper, or accepts a meeting, the most consequential decision in the buying process has usually already been made. The buyer has decided, in some undocumented way, who they are willing to consider, and the list rarely has more than three or four names.

This gap explains most of what mid-market B2B founders find baffling about their commercial performance: pipelines that look healthy alongside close rates that are collapsing; marketing spend that produces real volume but rarely the right accounts; win-loss reviews that surface no clear pattern, because the deciding factor never appeared in any conversation the firm had access to. What gets missed is what was deciding the deal.

I have spent ten years working with mid-market B2B firms in the £5M to £50M revenue range, and a version of this story arrives in nearly every engagement. The shape of the buyer journey has shifted at a pace that has outrun most companies' ability to think about it clearly. Vendors still describe buyer behaviour in terms of funnels, MQLs and last-touch attribution. Their buyers, meanwhile, have moved on to a different process entirely: one the vendor is not part of, cannot measure, and frequently does not know is happening.

What follows is a synthesis of a decade of analyst research and field observation, organised around a single argument. B2B buyers are now in control of the journey. Most of the work that determines whether you win or lose happens before the funnel ever opens. The competitive question for founders is whether their go-to-market is built to compete at that level, or only at the part of the process the buyer chooses to make visible.

The shortlist was made elsewhere

Gartner's research, published in their 2021 Future of Sales report and corroborated in the years since, points to a number that should reorder the priorities of every commercial leader in B2B. When buyers undertake a major purchase, they spend on average 17% of their total buying time with all potential suppliers combined. If a deal is competitive, with three or four vendors involved, an individual sales team might receive 5% of the buyer's attention.

Five percent.

That is the share of the conversation a typical B2B sales team gets to influence. The remaining 95% takes place in private research, internal discussions, peer conversations, and review of materials the vendor will probably never see. By the time the buyer is ready for that 5%, they have done most of the work of deciding what they want, who they find credible, and what objections any vendor will need to overcome.

The data backs this up from multiple angles. 6sense, the intent-data platform, reports that B2B buyers complete roughly 70% of their evaluation before engaging a salesperson at all (6sense, 2023). McKinsey's 2024 Global B2B Pulse finds that two-thirds of buying activity in enterprise technology now takes place in digital channels: research, peer reviews, community discussions, ungated content (McKinsey, 2024). The combined picture is consistent. By the time a buyer agrees to take a meeting, the question they bring to the meeting is usually no longer "should we consider you," but "give us a reason to keep considering you."

The implication is uncomfortable, and most marketing teams are not set up to handle it. Demand generation as it is conventionally practised, with paid media, gated content, lead scoring and MQL handoff, is engineered to capture buyers who have already self-identified as in-market. Those buyers, by definition, have already made the decision that matters: who they are willing to evaluate. The marketing team's job in the conventional model is to be one of the names on the list.

How you got on the list in the first place is the question almost no marketing dashboard answers. It is also the question that determines whether your firm has a real go-to-market or an expensive way of participating in deals you were always going to win or lose on factors set in motion months earlier.

The deciders you do not see

Even when you make the list, the structure of the buying group works against the assumption that good selling closes the deal. Mid-market B2B purchases now involve, on average, ten to eleven stakeholders, up from five to seven a decade ago (Corporate Visions, 2025). For technology investments above $100,000, CFO sign-off is required in roughly four out of five cases. The buying committee includes IT, finance, end users, risk, legal, security, and increasingly at least one C-level executive.

The thing nobody tells you is that the formal committee is rarely the body that actually decides. Inside most committees there is an informal authority structure that operates underneath the agenda. The technical lead whose recommendation no one overrides. The board member who mentioned a name in passing six months ago. The COO who worked with one of the vendors at a previous company. The peer at another firm who said something casual about a bad implementation experience.

Your CRM does not have a field for this person. Your sales process does not account for them. They never accept a meeting and rarely appear in attribution data. Their opinion frequently ends the conversation before it formally begins. In the language of buying behaviour research they are informal influencers. In the language of founders losing deals, they are the reason a perfectly run sales process produces a "no" that no one can quite explain.

This is what is happening when a buyer chooses a smaller, less capable competitor over a vendor with stronger references. It is what produces the win-loss interview where every buyer you reach gives a different reason, because the actual reason was a thirty-second conversation in a corridor eight months before the RFP, and none of the people you can interview were part of it. Cycles get longer (Forrester research now places the median enterprise B2B cycle close to a year, up significantly from the eight months commonly observed in the mid-2010s). Committees get larger. The volume of formal touchpoints increases. The deal still gets decided informally.

The standard response to this set of problems is multithreading: cultivate three or four contacts inside the account so the loss of any single champion does not cost the deal. LinkedIn's research suggests this is sound practice on its own terms, since reps lose deals when a champion leaves and engaging multiple contacts reduces that risk substantially (LinkedIn, 2022). Multithreading, though, is a tactic for managing pipeline you already have. It does not address the prior question of how a buyer comes to consider you in the first place, and it does nothing about the influencers who never accept a meeting because they were not invited to.

The funnel describes the visible part

The funnel as a model is not wrong, exactly. It is a description of one specific phase of the buying process: the phase the vendor can see. The problem is that vendors have been treating that visible phase as if it were the whole picture, and have built their measurement, their headcount and their compensation systems on the assumption that controlling it controls the outcome.

The data does not support that assumption. Edelman's annual Trust Barometer finds that brand familiarity is the single most consistent tiebreaker when buyers see two solutions that look similar. When a deal comes down to comparable proposals, buyers default to the firm whose name they already trusted before the process started (Edelman, 2024). Research from LinkedIn's B2B Institute, alongside the long-running work of marketing scientists Les Binet and Peter Field, suggests these familiarity effects operate on horizons of months to years, far longer than the quarters most demand-gen teams measure.

Inside the firm, what this looks like is a measurement problem with no satisfying solution. The investments that drive familiarity, including analyst relations, podcast appearances, executive thought leadership, community sponsorship, conference presence and content with no gating, produce no immediate trackable response. They are paid for in the present and pay back across an attribution horizon that no marketing platform is designed to capture. They show up in pipeline as direct traffic, or as self-reported source "I just knew you," or, most often, as deals that close with no marketing-attributed touchpoint at all.

The terminology in circulation for this category is dark social: the conversations, recommendations and exposures that happen in private channels. Slack groups, WhatsApp threads, podcast listening, LinkedIn DMs, casual conversations at conferences. Refine Labs and Chris Walker have argued for years that dark social is where most B2B buying decisions are seeded. The response from finance-conscious marketing leaders has typically been a reasonable version of "if I cannot measure it, I cannot defend the spend." That objection makes sense given how marketing budgets are governed. It does not change the fact that the firms whose competitors keep showing up on shortlists ahead of them are the firms losing the dark-social game.

Two findings worth keeping in view. The share of B2B purchase decisions reported as influenced by social media, chiefly LinkedIn, has continued to rise; LinkedIn's own research puts it above 70% (LinkedIn, 2023), which is consistent with what most firms see anecdotally even when their attribution dashboards do not. Second, the introduction of generative AI as a research tool means the citation economy is now adding another invisible layer. When a buyer asks an AI assistant for "the best vendors in our space," the model returns the names that appear most consistently across the sources it was trained on. Firms not in those sources are not in the answer. The conversation is happening in places vendors cannot enter, and the cost of being absent compounds.

Why "more leads" is the wrong response

The first instinct most founders have when they recognise this gap is to spend more on marketing. If the funnel is producing the wrong outcomes, the reasoning goes, the funnel needs more inputs. Add SDRs, increase ad spend, run more campaigns, build content velocity, buy a bigger ABM platform. Activity feels like progress, and the alternative is uncomfortable.

The data tells a different story. In every engagement I have run with a £20M to £50M B2B firm in the last five years, the same diagnostic produces the same finding. We pull the last 18 months of closed-won deals and tag each one by where the relationship genuinely originated, ignoring CRM last-touch attribution and asking the buyer or the original opportunity owner directly. Across more than two dozen of these analyses, between 50% and 70% of revenue is consistently traceable to relationship- or referral-based origins: existing clients, past colleagues, inbound enquiries from buyers who had been quietly following the firm for months, conversations at conferences, introductions from people the founder did not realise were sending business their way.

The lead-generation budget is rarely producing those deals. It is producing a different and frequently worse cohort: lower-margin, longer-cycle, higher-loss-rate opportunities concentrated in segments where the firm's competitive position is weakest. The most common pattern is the firm paying six figures a year to fill a pipeline of deals it was never going to win, while the deals it was always going to win arrive through channels nobody is investing in.

What looks like a marketing problem is in fact an investment-allocation problem in marketing's clothing. Spending more on a channel that is generating the wrong cohort produces more of the wrong cohort. The firm gets busier and sales cycles lengthen. Marketing reports activity that the board accepts as progress, while the underlying economics get worse. The solution requires the founder to do something most founders find painful, which is to stop spending on activity that is generating measurable outcomes in favour of activity that will pay back later, in ways that are harder to attribute.

Subtraction is the harder lever. It demands the courage to admit that something previously chosen is not working: to cut the segment the firm is bad at serving, raise the price the firm is afraid to raise, sunset the product line the team is emotionally invested in. The companies that grow fastest in the £5M to £50M range almost always share one trait. They have figured out what to stop doing before they figure out what to scale. Growth at this stage is not always about more. Sometimes it is about less, executed properly.

What actually generates the customers you want

The honest answer to "where does our revenue come from" is, for most mid-market firms, also the answer to "what should we invest in." It rarely matches what the firm has historically been investing in.

The work that produces the customers founders want, the high-margin, long-tenure, easy-to-renew clients who refer others, almost never traces back to a campaign. It traces back to one of three things. A relationship the founder has cultivated personally over years. A piece of work the firm shipped that became known in the buyer's network. A presence in places the buyer trusts before they were in-market.

The first is the simplest to invest in and the easiest to underweight. Most founders treat their personal network as a fortunate accident rather than a structural asset, and most marketing budgets treat it as out of scope. In practice, the founder who spends two hours a week on three or four high-value relationships, deliberately, is doing more for next year's pipeline than most six-figure ABM programmes.

The second, work the firm shipped that became known, is the part of the picture that most directly explains the gap between firms that grow durably and firms that plateau. Reputation in B2B is not built by talking about the work; it is built by doing work that is interesting enough to be talked about. A small number of distinctively good engagements with the right clients produces more pipeline than a larger number of competent engagements with anyone who will pay. Case selection, choosing which clients to take and which to decline, is therefore a marketing decision, not just a sales one.

The third, presence in trusted channels, includes industry analyst coverage, selective podcast guesting, substantive thought leadership in places buyers actually read, a point of view on the firm's category repeatedly expressed in formats that survive the publication that hosted them. These investments rarely produce trackable results inside a quarter. They reliably produce inbound enquiries, citations in AI search, and the pre-purchase familiarity that ends up being the tiebreaker on deals the firm did not know were happening.

None of this should be unfamiliar to founders who have run businesses for any length of time. What gets in the way is that the modern B2B marketing function is structured to do almost none of it. The metrics it reports, the platforms it buys, the headcount it hires, and the conversations it has with the board are all built around the visible part of the funnel. The work that actually drives growth in mid-market sits mostly outside that field of view, which is why it sits mostly outside the budget.

What founders should actually do

Three diagnostics are worth running before the next planning cycle.

The first is the deal-source audit. Take the last 24 months of closed-won deals and tag each one by where the relationship actually started, asking the original opportunity owner directly rather than relying on CRM attribution. Compare the result to where the marketing budget was spent. Most founders find a gap of 50% or more between the two pictures. That gap is the brief for next year's marketing investment.

The second is the invisible-influencer review. For the last five lost deals where the loss reason in the CRM is "selected another vendor," call the buyer's contact and ask a different question: who, inside their organisation, was the first person to mention the competitor's name, and when. The answer tends to be specific, surprising, and consistent across deals. It also tends to point at a category of relationship the firm has not been investing in.

The third is the relevance horizon test. Pick the firm's top five target accounts for the next year. For each, ask whether anyone at that account has any reason to know who you are before they start a buying process. If the answer is no, the work to win that account is not next quarter's pitch. It is the twelve months of presence that needs to begin now.

Run honestly, these three exercises produce a different brief for the marketing function than the one most firms operate against. Not a brief about lead volume or campaign performance. A brief about earning relevance in the conversations that decide deals before deals exist. The work is harder to measure, harder to defend in a budget meeting, and harder to do well. It also happens to be the work that compounds.

If the analysis above describes something you recognise in your own pipeline, the deal-source audit is a sensible starting point. It is the opening exercise in JTN Group's growth advisory engagements, and it produces a clearer picture of where revenue is genuinely coming from, what is propping it up, and where the highest-leverage shift in commercial investment lies over the next four quarters. To discuss how the diagnostic might apply to your firm, get in touch.

Sources

6sense. Don't Call Us, We'll Call You (2023); Corporate Visions. B2B Buying Behaviour in 2025 (2025); Edelman. Trust Barometer Special Report: B2B (2024); Forrester. Buyer's Journey Benchmark Survey (2024); Gartner. The Future of Sales: Digital-First Transformation Strategies (2021); LinkedIn. State of Sales 2022 (2022); LinkedIn. B2B Buyer Behaviour Report (2023); McKinsey & Company. Global B2B Pulse (2024).